An Insider’s Story Of Gaza

Somebody who hasn’t seen the face of “The Butcher,” cannot really understand what happened in Gaza this July, in the days when Hamas defeated Fatah.He is the sorrow and rage personified, frightening and miserable at the same time. Swollen, managing to look pale even with dark skin, his red eyes look wide open on something awful, looking at the horrifying surprise of that overwhelming Hamas. He sits with two generals at a table of the coffee shop Pronto in Ramallah, a secular place where they serve eggs and bacon and beer. But he drinks only coffee. He is one of the top commanders of the Palestinian Authority Force 17 Presidential Guard. He speaks while chain smoking, his hands trembling. He doesn’t want to eat, but while he drinks his coffee with a lot of milk, he picks very small pieces of bread from my breakfast, like looking for confidence and familiarity. But he is “The Butcher,” and you can guess it’s not a matter of chance. His real name is secret. It’s forbidden for the officials, the protagonists of the disaster of Fatah, of which he is certainly one, to speak to journalists.Force 17 has always been the most respected elite unit of the Palestinian Authority, the one that Arafat personally founded and used as his guard. The colonel is 50 years old but looks older. His face is round, his body tough and small. His mouth looks like he never visited the dentist. He wears a black shirt and moves it with his right hand to show me his left shoulder: “Look here, it’s still blue and swollen. I’ve shot, I’ve shot a lot, I almost defeated them, I gave them a good lesson, but they lied, they betrayed, they behaved like wild beasts. They are not human beings. I was in every war, in Iraq, in Somalia. I have fought always with Abu Ammar, I was with him in Jordan during Black September, in Beirut, in Tunis. I was in Sabra and Shatila. But I never saw a dirty war like the one Hamas has fought, with ferocity. If I must say in a word why we lost: we also had RPG; but we didn’t want to use them against our women and children. And they did against ours.”If this is the reason of the defeat, it’s funny, because it’s the Western world’s problem, asymmetric war. But maybe there are other reasons. In the West Bank there are official inquires about the spectacular loss, whose main responsibility might fall on the PLO official Mahmoud Dahlan.People who saw “The Butcher” operate in Gaza say that when Fatah was in control of the Palestinian weapons and militias its actions made the man on the street angry. I look at the colonel, and I can imagine him walking in the streets of Gaza City with his Kalashnikov hanging on his shoulder, his men around him, the king of the street, without anybody daring to stop them, their corruption, their violence. But now he is defeated.“We had already been fighting for six months when the big confrontation came. We had occupied the higher floors of the towers, and they made us descend using a pretended truce mediated by Egypt,” he said. “Immediately after we came down they took our places and started shooting at us; they had a plan of division of Gaza in different squares, with the aim of not allowing our people to move where we needed them. They pushed us and closed us with the shoulders to the sea, we were only 35 shooting like crazy against hundreds, I kept trying to call my 185 men but they could not get to us: the strip, the town, Rafah, Khan Yunnis, everything was isolated.”During the clash on the beach, the big betrayal took place: the mosques started calling the families of the soldiers asking them to go and pick them up from the beach, otherwise everybody would have been killed. Sophocles could not have thought a better plot. So the mothers, the families, flocked into the beach with big bags full of civilian clothes: “My men one after the other took off their uniforms, threw them and their weapons into the water, wore the trousers and t-shirts that their mothers brought and went home.”“The Butcher” says he remained there with many dead and wounded all around him. “I kept fighting and made them pay a very high price, shooting until the end with my RPG. I fought for one day and a half without stopping, at two in the morning I left the area with my face covered and civilian clothes. But after a few hours, while I was hiding at the tenth floor of a tower where the Egyptians had an office, they captured me.”The Egyptians were not able to defend him. It was all blood and fire around when the people from Hamas took “The Butcher,” and while he was descending the stairs, they showed him dead and wounded people around, and also people that were just being executed: “‘Now we are going to kill you like this, just that way’ they kept repeating. I was sure it was my last hour, so that I asked them to kill me right away and to throw me in the dump,” he said.But Hamas decided, for reasons that we will probably never know, while killing other officials that were captured, to spare the life of the colonel, put him on a jeep and let them leave with few others after 12 hours of detention, blindfolded and sure they were going to die. The colonel now hates, hates very much. He doesn’t know if he hates Hamas more than the Israelis.“Look,” he says. “They took the guy that prepared coffee and tea for us, blindfolded him, brought him on top of a tower of 13 floors and threw him down. He was mentally disabled. They shot Samih el Madun, a great leader of the Al Aqsa Martyrs, and passed with a car over his head so many time that at the end he didn’t have any head anymore. I’ve seen many atrocities, I would like to go back there to fight. And they are traitors, because they did everything at Iran’s order: the Iranians are there, yes, I have seen two of them personally. And met a lot of people that went abroad for training. The Hamas leadership regularly sends them there. They are traitors.”Ms. Nirenstein is an Italian journalist who lives in Israel.

An Insider’s Story Of Gaza

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